Kojima Productions has been working on Xbox console-exclusive horror game OD for quite some time now, and aside from a spooky trailer, little information has been revealed about it. In an interview with Entertainment Weekly, director and studio founder Hideo Kojima teased some details about the horror title, and even spoke about how scary it is going to be.
He was also cognisant of people who might want to play a game directed by him but don’t quite have the stomach to handle scary experiences in horror games. For players like that, he said that he has thought up a system that will allow them to experience OD as well.
“I wanted to go beyond the limit of the ‘scariness’ that other games had reached,” he said about OD. “It’s a single-player game, and I wanted to make it as scary as possible. But for those that might stop playing when it gets too scary, I have thought of a system that will allow them to keep going. I can’t say much more, because it’ll give too much of a hint on the system, and I could get in trouble for saying too much!”
Kojima also spoke about the difficulty of getting OD made, noting that he had already come up with the concept when the original Death Stranding was still in development. He recalled that many companies he pitched the project to called him “crazy”, saying that they didn’t understand the general concept.
“I wanted to do something new. I wanted to do something different,” he says. “I had this OD concept since I was working on DS1 [Death Stranding] and I was working on it just by myself. I can’t reveal much detail, but it’s something that no one has ever seen before. A new game system.”
“I pitched to many people, to the big companies, and also to the up-and-coming companies. All of them said the same thing. They said that I’m crazy, and that they really don’t understand the concept — that they will not be able to do it.”
Ultimately, the title started development under Xbox thanks to a deal made between Kojima and former Xbox CEO Phil Spencer. Current CEO of the division, Asha Sharma, even went as far as calling it a “deeply moving game”.
OD was announced all the way back in 2023, and Kojima Productions had confirmed that it was making use of Unreal Engine and MetaHuman to make the game. While details remain scarce, the game is also expected to use Microsoft’s cloud technology in some way, and Kojima has gone as far as to call it “a game, but also a movie.” Owing to the fact that the studio has been busy with Death Stranding 2: On the Beach until last year, as well as 2024’s SAG-AFTRA strikes, development on OD was slow.
Earlier this year, Kojima said that the studio will largely focus on the development of OD and espionage game Physint in 2026. Of the two, OD is expected to come out first, and Physint has just entered the “preparation” phase, which involves casting actors and scanning.
